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Batteries: smartphones’ unfulfilled promise

Smartphone batteries have become manufacturers’ unfulfilled promise. In the past few years, we have seen how the industry has focused on improving several key aspects like displays, raw performance and cameras, but batteries have always been forgotten about.

This has led us to a complicated situation: we have smartphones capable of providing great performance and high-quality photos but that are incapable of being used a whole day. The problem is definitely more evident with each new generation, which has been confirmed by The Washington Post with a chart comparing the battery life of several phones of different generations.

The chart speaks for itself. Every smartphone on it has been tested under the same conditions: a single full battery charge under constant web browsing until it is depleted. Curiously, the phone with the best result is the iPhone XR, a phone with an IPS display.

In second place we have the Galaxy Note 9, and in third place we have the iPhone 8 Plus, a model that outperformed the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max. The key aspect of the chart is that lithium-ion batteries are being improved although not fast enough as to fulfill the needs of the new phones’ hardware.

In other words, even with new manufacturing processes and improvements in terms of battery optimization, the needs of last-gen smartphones are not being satisfactorily met. This is why so many new models have less battery life than previous generations.

With the arrival of new technologies like 5G, maybe the situation will get worse. Therefore, the big companies of the sector should really start working on improving the battery capacity of mobile devices.